Educational Reforms Still Have no Answer for School System

The Gates Foundation is regrouping after its latest school improvement disappointment, but it’s not bowing out of the education reform business.

As the philanthropic powerhouse led by Bill and Melinda Gates explained in their latest annual letter to the public, it ended its effort to overhaul teacher evaluation systems after determining that these efforts were failing to generate intended results.

Shiny objectives

This article by Jack Schneider and David Menefee-Libey originally appeared at The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Why big bets on educational reform haven’t fixed the US school system”

The Gates Foundation (which is a strategic partner of The Conversation US and provides funding for The Conversation internationally) poured at least $700 million into upgrading teacher evaluation systems between 2008 and 2013, before quietly pulling the plug. The move echoed a similar about-face that occurred decade ago, when the funder acknowledged that the $2 billion it had spent on making America’s large high schools smaller hadn’t achieved the desired results.

Along the way, reformers – those in government and the philanthropic world alike – have made big promises that American voters have often found irresistible, even though these grandiose proposals have tended to fall short.

Former PBS NewsHour education correspondent John Merrow sums up his book ‘Addicted to Reform,’ which describes the pitfalls of the K-12 reform movement.

Not wavering

Individually, their projects have differed. While Gates has favored small schools and teacher evaluation, Broad’s foundation has emphasized charter schools and training school superintendents. Collectively, however, they have sought to transform the way schools look and operate.

All have encountered setbacks. Still, the larger ethos of reform hasn’t changed, and none of these billionaires appear to be wavering in their efforts.

For their part, lawmakers have been equally committed to large-scale reform. From George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Barack Obama’s Race to the Top and the Every Student Succeeds Act that he signed into law in 2015, the federal government has taken a highly interventionist approach to education policy. Educators, scholars and policymakers now almost universally regard No Child Left Behind as a washout. And many critiques of Obama-era reform efforts have been equally blistering. But the core approach to federal education policy has not markedly changed.

The chief reason that all this activity has produced so little change, in our view, is that the movement’s populist politics encourage reformers to make promises beyond what they can reasonably expect to deliver. The result, then, is a cycle of searing critique, sweeping proposal, disappointment and new proposal. Indeed, the Gates Foundation announced in October 2017 that it would carry on with its education reform efforts, putting $1.7 billion into new strategies to bolster K-12 education.

Betsy DeVos, shaking hands at a school choice rally a few weeks before she became education secretary in 2017.AP Photo/Maria Danilova

Cookie cutters

Beyond this dysfunctional cycle, the other big reason the school reform movement has consistently come up short has to do with an approach that is both too narrow and too generic.

Ever since 1966, when Johns Hopkins University sociologist James S. Coleman determined in his government-commissioned report that low-income children of color benefit from learning in integrated settings, most education researchers have agreed that economic inequality and social injustice are among the most powerful drivers of educational achievement gaps. What students achieve in a school, in other words, reflects their living conditions outside its walls.

Yet rather than addressing the daunting issues like persistent poverty that shape children’s lives and interfere with their learning, education reformers have largely embraced a management consultant approach. That is, they seek systems-oriented solutions that can be assessed through bottom-line indicators.

Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor, discusses the gap between how low-income and rich students perform academically.

At the same time, reformers have tried to enact change at the largest possible scale. To work everywhere, however, education reforms must be suitable for all schools, regardless of their particular circumstances.

This cookie-cutter approach ignores educational research. Scholars consistently find that schools don’t work that way. We believe, as others do, that successful schools are thriving ecosystems adapted to local circumstances. One-size-fits-all reform programs simply can’t have a deep impact in all schools and in every community.

Unfortunately for the Gates Foundation and their allies, successful K-12 reform probably requires abandoning this one-size-fits-all approach. That, however, is unlikely to happen. “We’ve learned a lot about what works in education, but the challenge has been to replicate the successes widely,” Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in their letter.

Bill Gates, discussing teacher quality in a 2009 TED talk.

Entrepreneurial outsiders

Perhaps this flawed approach to education reform has survived year after year of disappointing results because policy leaders, donors and politicians tend not to challenge each other on the premise that the ideal of school reform requires a sweeping overhaul – even though they may disagree about the best route.

Finally, the reformers see failure as an acceptable part of the entrepreneurial process. Rather than second-guess their approach when their plans come up short, they may just believe that they placed the wrong bet. As a result, the constant blare of pitches and promises continues. And it’s possible that none of them will ever measure up.

Login

Join in our conversation! While you can comment on any of our articles without registering, create an account now to be able to connect with other members, discuss new topics in our forums, and to get regular email alerts with the latest news.